Literary Birthday – 7 February – Patrick McGrath

Happy Birthday, Patrick McGrath, born 7 February 1950

Five Quotes

I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamoured of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled.

I think exile will certainly work for a writer, by allowing him the distance, the detachment, to work without being distracted by the uproar of the present.

It has seemed to me that for a long time the writer and the psychiatrist have been up to very similar things in terms of the exploration of human dysfunction. The writer wants to create forms of entertainment and to give pleasure, the psychiatrist is engaged in a therapeutic task. But we are both essentially engaged in the exploration of human nature.

Houses, I have come to believe, like love, like nature herself, should not reassure, should not attempt to soothe, or give comfort, but should, rather, excite.

None of us is a reliable narrator really. Borges has written about this: you tell a story and after the fourth time you tell it you don’t know if you’re remembering the thing that happened or you’re remembering the last time you told the story.

Patrick McGrath is a British novelist whose work has been categorised as Gothic fiction. He is the author of Asylum and Spider.